Book Review: The End of Eternity

A few years ago I read Asimov’s famous novel Foundation and loathed it from beginning to end. Heinlein and Clarke might be a bit clunky, but at least they can manage interesting plots and passable dialogue. Asimov is a sort of anti-writer, managing to completely fuck up literally every aspect of chosen craft: prose style, plotting, pacing, dialogue, characters, everything. Why I chose to read another of his novels I have no idea.

What’s it about? Time travel and social engineering, an institution called Eternity which meddles with the various centuries of mankind to produce more desirable results. This all takes place in the far future, the entirely fictional 275th century etc, so don’t imagine you’re going to see anything like an alternate 20th century or anything like that, anything that be even mildly interesting. No, this is more of what Foundation served up – an eye-scratchingly tedious two hundred pages of bloated, formless dialogue and old men lecturing people. It’s also, obviously, super sexist. I don’t know why I read this and I definitely don’t know why Asimov is considered one of the 20th century’s most important science fiction writers.